SJW research not what it's cracked up to be

Full disclosure: I am not a PhD candidate. What I am, though, is somebody who has logged over 2,500 hours in Skyrim, so I think that I can safely make observations about the basic game. And it would be to my suggestion to Ms. Cooper that she find a different example for white people using a game for a safe space from ‘multiculturalism and white guilt’ than Skyrim. Anybody who plays the game past, say, the introduction knows that one major theme of the game is the Skyrim Civil War. In fact, the game cannot be finished without first resolving the Skyrim Civil War. And the Skyrim Civil War is explicitly couched as being the cosmopolitan, inclusive Empire of Tamriel against the racist, xenophobic Nordic Stormcloaks. Literally the first thing the player sees when he or she enters Windhelm (the Stormcloak’s capital city) for the first time is a mob harassing a Dark Elf over her skin color and refugee status. In short: if you’re looking for a game world ‘free of multiculturalism and white guilt,’ don’t play Skyrim.

Why? Because Bethesda Softworks isn’t made up of dumb people: they knew that putting a big Viking hero on all the ads would result in people wanting to play Vikings. They also knew that the people who did that would also tend to pick the Vikings’ side in the in-game’s civil war. All of which is fine, but Bethesda prides itself on making good games, so they deliberately made the ‘default’ side rather more immediately distasteful to modern sensibilities with regard to race and tolerance. They did not go to extremes on this — you can play as, say an Argonian (amphibian lizard men) who has inexplicably decided to join the Stormcloak Rebellion (despite the fact that the Stormcloaks make Argonians live outside the city walls, and in abject poverty), and it won’t actually affect gameplay — but it really is impossible to ignore that “Skyrim belongs to the Nords!” is a common sentiment. It is, in fact, the default NPC companion’s favorite war cry.

Again, Ms. Cooper might have noticed this flaw in her thesis if she had played the game for very long.